I am a serious tomato fanatic, so each growing season I’m always thinking about “how many” tomato plants I’ll be putting in, not “IF” I’ll be growing them that season. Invariably, I end up buying WAY too many, and I’m left trying to find homes for them all in various (often weird) locations around my property.

This year was supposed to be different – and it DID start that way! I purchased less than 20 small plants, and I knew exactly where they were going to go ahead of time.

But then one of my “hair-brained ideas” hit and I just HAD to go out a buy 33 more!
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Long story short, earlier in the spring I ripped up the grass just outside of my fence (running along the sidewalk), and have planted a row of giant sunflowers (which are doing quite well so far). I thought it might ALSO be fun to run a row of “help yourself” tomatoes right along the sidewalk. I’ve been gradually moving towards creating a suburban “demonstration eco-garden” to help educate the neighborhood a bit (and hopefully make people realize that I’m not just a complete lunatic – haha) – and I thought this would be a great way to make an impact. As it is, I already get quite a lot of nice comments from people walking by, so this has helped me to feel more confident about my idea.

Anyway…after giving my “help yourself tomato fence” idea some more thought, I decided not to go ahead with it this year. I knew it would require a LOT of extra work, along with the seemingly obvious (in hindsight, of course – haha) fact that the “Kong” sunflowers are just going to end up crowding/shading the tomatoes.

SO, I’m left with 33 extra tomato plants – specifically “Tomatoberry” plants. Needless to say, I think this is going to be the “year of the tomato” in my garden!
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Ok – now let’s start talking about the fun things I’m going to try out! In this post I’ll talk specifically about my wooden box gardens, but you had better believe there will be other posts featuring OTHER tomato growing approaches, and so on and so forth!

Some of you may recognize these wooden boxes as the containers used for my ill-fated “Worm Composting Potato Towers“. I’m not sure if it was the rainy, cool weather last summer, or flaws in my approach (likely both), but it seemed that potatoes and composting worms were not destined to live together in a mutually beneficial habitat (may try it again at some point though).

Tomatoes, while closely related to potatoes, are a different beast, so I thought I might have more success with them being grown in a similar fashion – i.e. basically being grown in a worm bed. Just to be on the safe side though, I opted to do more of a ‘hybrid’ approach – at least initially (while the plants are still small, and the material in the bin is still fairly unprocessed). As such, I created normal soil zones where the plants are being started.

In one box, I decided to try a four corner approach with “Sweet Million” cherry tomatoes.

I started by filling the box with a little yard waste (at the bottom) and aged horse manure/straw. I then excavated cavities in the four corners of the bed. These were then filled with “black earth” soil and some old worm compost before the plants were added.

I was thinking it would be cool to add a “Worm Tower” in the middle, but in thinking about it a bit more I decided that I don’t need to get that fancy! I will simply deposit “food” materials directly in the bed (in the central zone) instead. One such food material will be the alpaca manure I wrote about recently, but I’ll almost certainly be adding food wastes as well.

In the second box, I thought I would try growing a single “Beefsteak” tomato plant, smack dab in the middle. I had visions of turning this plant into a giant tomato tree, but as I’ll explain in a minute, my dreams came crashing down in a hurry!

I set up the tomato “habitat” in exactly the same manner as I did in the four corners bin. I dug a hole, filled it will black earth and worm compost, then put in the tomato plant.

Unlike the Sweet Million plants (which as you can see in the first picture, are doing just fine), the Beefsteak unfortunately went downhill almost immediately after it was planted (see picture below). I’m not really sure what happened there, but I decided to scrap that approach for the time being – and ended up creating (much more recently) another four-corner bed using grape tomatoes.

Based on the healthy appearance of the Sweet Million plants thus far, I am guardedly optimistic that this is going to work out well. At the moment, there aren’t all that many Red Worms in either bed (as compared to some of my other beds), so I think it may be important to up the population fairly soon. I want the tomatoes to have some nice material through-which they can spread their roots – and at the moment, a lot of it is pretty raw stuff (which may explain why the beefsteak didn’t do so well.

In upcoming “Vermi Tomato Gardening” posts I’ll write about my new raised bed (tomato) garden, and my vermi (tomato – haha) container gardens as well! Oh, and of course we’ll have to spend some time talking about tomatoes being grown next to my various vermicomposting trenches, and perhaps a mention of the tomato plant I plan to try in my vermiponics system!

Stay tuned! Much more vermi-tomato content to come.
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Several days ago I was quite surprised to come across an unusual worm sitting on the edge of my rain barrel. Given its jerky flailing movements, on first glance I assumed it was some sort of long “inch worm” (i.e. a type of caterpillar), but I quickly realized it was something else altogether. Given my background in identifying aquatic invertebrates (what I used to do as a “job”), I’m generally not thrown off by any small creepy crawly critters I come across on my property. This worm definitely had me stumped though.

My first guess was that it was some sort of giant nematode. As such, I did some digging online to see if I could track down any types of nematode that are not only large, but also terrestrial (or at least semi-terrestrial). Most of the nematodes I’ve come across in aquatic samples (and in my worm bins for that matter) were very tiny – either microscopic, or barely visible. As I learned, there IS a family of large-bodied parasitic nematodes, Mermithidae, that seemed to fit the bill. According to the Wikipedia entry for these worms, they are most commonly parasites of arthropods (insects, spiders, crustaceans etc), but there was also mention of the fact that a few species are known to parasitize earthworms!
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Ok – so I’m not really worried. In fact, I don’t even think these are mermithid nematodes at all! Another type of large nematode-like worm is the “Horsehair Worm” or “Gordian Worm”, and I’m not sure why these didn’t come to mind right off the bat – I certainly found plenty of them in various aquatic samples I used to sort through.

Gordian Worms, like mermithids, are typically parasites of various types of arthropods (grasshoppers are one of the more common hosts, I believe) – not the adult worms themselves, but the larvae that hatch out from the eggs they lay.

Since finding my first specimen, I’ve started seeing more of them – generally after rainfall (something we’ve been getting a lot of lately). I collected a couple of them today so I could take some pictures.

I will be very interested to see if I can determine what poor group of critters is going to be their host this year. I tend to have a decent population of grasshoppers and crickets each year so I’ll be keeping a close eye on them once they arrive.

Of course, just to be absolutely sure these worms aren’t up to no good, I will also be keeping a very close eye on my outdoor Red Worm beds!
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By the way, I came across this video on YouTube featuring a bunch of these worms in someone’s garden. These look exactly like the ones I’ve been finding around my yard

If you want to be really grossed out, check out this video showing horsehair worms leaving their cricket host: